Nine Lives of the Sparrow
by BrilliantlyMadSparrow
Summary: Little known fact - Sparrows, like cats, have nine lives. At least, Jack Sparrow does. Within these cyber pages are chronicled the near-death experiences that made up the childhood of everyone's favorite pirate captain.
1. Ye Little Idiot

Chapter 1 ~ **Ye Little Idiot**

_Shipwreck Cove, 1682_

_3 Years of Age_

Shipwreck Cove was the worst place in the world to raise a family. Despite this, many pirates did. There was one main reason for this - It was nigh on the only place where a pirate could be safe from the Royal Navy and the East India Trading Company.

Ananya Sparrow, whose name had been shortened to "Anne" when she had married a man from the Caribbean and gone away from India with him, knew that Shipwreck Cove wasn't exactly child-friendly. Her husband, a pirate lord known as Teague, didn't seem to know that, though. What Teague, and most of the other pirates, didn't seem to understand, was that the rough-and-rumble residents of Shipwreck could prove as dangerous to unwitting children as the Navy and the Company could to pirates. The only way for children to survive in such an environment was to adapt and be as rough-and-rumble as the pirates they grew up around.

Anne knew this well, and thanked her lucky stars that Jasper, her seven-year-old son, and Reese, her five-year-old daughter, had managed to do just that. She was, though, a bit worried about her youngest child, Jack, a boy who was the tender age of three.

Jack had been lucky enough just to survive being born. The captain's quarters of a pirate ship really don't make that good of a birthing room. Especially when the ship those captain's quarters belong to is being tossed around in the middle of the Indian Ocean by a hurricane maelstrom of unheard-of magnitude. Not a pleasant experience, by any means.

But it seemed that Jack did everything in his power to push his luck, even though his power wasn't too great yet, thankfully. He'd always had a natural talent for getting into and/or making trouble. Luckily, he had yet to do anything that caused any real harm.

Thinking of Jack, Anne suddenly realized that she hadn't seen or heard from the boy for the last hour. That couldn't possibly mean anything at all good.

"Jack!" she called out, "Jackie, where are ye?" There came no response. He wasn't in the house then. This was starting to turn into something very bad.

"Jasper! Reese!" Anne called for her other children. After a few moments, her daughter and other son came in. "Have either of ye seen yer little brother about anywhere?" she asked, looking at their faces searchingly.

Jasper shook his head right away, and said very fast, "Nope. Haven't seen 'im. Can I go now, Mum?" He was eager to get back to a game of pretend pirating that he and his friends had been playing, so ran full speed out the door without waiting for a response.

Reese was not in quite so much of a hurry, she'd just been climbing a tree when her mother had called. "I saw 'im, Mummy," she said, helpfully.

"Where?" Anne inquired. She didn't much care where exactly he was, so long as she knew and he wasn't in any immediate danger.

"By the beach," Reese answered, pointing out the porthole window, " 'E was gonna go swimmin'!" Then she giggled and skipped off to go play somewhere.

Anne looked out the window. The Sparrow household was very near the beach, due to the family's general love of the sea. Anne squinted and peered out at the ocean. She could see a dark figure floundering about in the water. It couldn't be... Could it?

"Jack!" Anne shouted, her voice a mixture of worry and motherly anger. She ran out of the house, really a large, wrecked ship converted into a land residence, and down to the beach. The figure drowning beneath four feet of water was now unmistakably Jack. He lay still and pale underneath the water, the water currents playing about with the toddler's shaggy hair.

Anne made no hesitation in running into the water, though she grumbled angrily the entire time. (Spewing some..._ strong_ words about Teague's... _questionable_ parenting skills, in particular, as he had been supposed to be keeping an eye on the children while they played outside.) Anne took a breath and ducked under the water.

Her fingers closed around one of Jack's arms. She pulled him to the surface, but he made no reaction. That definitely was not a good sign.

Anne dragged her son to shore, where still he made no movement. Not one muscle quivered, not one eyelid fluttered, not one breath moved through his chest.

Luckily, Anne, living so close to the sea and being married to, and technically, a pirate, had at least some idea of how to save a drowning person. She sat Jack up, positioned so he leaned forward over her arm, and used her other arm to gently pound, if such an action was possible, on his back.

After a moment or so, Jack began coughing violently. Anne waited and held him there until the toddler had coughed up more water than it seemed such small lungs could hold.

Jack looked up at his mother and smiled what would, later in life, become his signature smirk. In as much of a drawl as a three-year-old could manage, he said smoothly, " 'Ello, Mummy."

Most women would have immediately gripped their child in a smothering hug, tears flooding their eyes. But Anne wasn't most women. She was a pirate. As such, she slapped Jack upside the head. "Jack," she reprimanded sternly, "Ye could've drowned, ye little idiot."

Anne was still a mother, though, pirate that she was, so she held her child close in a relieved embrace. He may indeed have been a "little idiot", but she was obligated to love him anyways.


	2. Swordplay

Chapter 2 ~ **Swordplay**

_Shipwreck Cove, 1686_

_7 Years of Age_

Jack Sparrow sat at the foot of a large cupboard, gazing up at the top. Just barely visible, was a silver glint that could only belong to something incredibly shiny. It was so beautiful, so tempting, and Jack wanted it very badly. To a seven-year-old pirate, if it was shiny then it was treasure.

Jack sat in Teague's office, his young brain formulating a plan of how to get the sword off of the top of his father's cabinet. It was so shiny, though, it was rather distracting. In lieu of an actual, good, safe plan, he decided to stack things on top of other things until he had a tower tall enough to climb up and reach the top of the cupboard.

He started with a small side table, pushing it right up against the wood of the cabinet. Then, he placed a chair on top of that. On top of the chair, he piled all the books on his father's shelves in a staircase fashion, so that he would have a few footholds to cling to.

Finally, the tower was tall enough that Jack could stand on it and reach the top of the cupboard. He carefully scaled the hastily-constructed, most likely not structurally sound, pile, which lurched and shook as he climbed.

The largest book Teague owned, a huge atlas (Most of which was waiting to be filled in), sat unstably at the top of the pile. Jack perched precariously atop it and stretched up his right hand to grasp the glinting blade. He couldn't see the sword itself, and so blindly groped about the top of the cabinet.

Suddenly, he gasped in pain and jerked his hand away. There was a nasty cut across the palm. Scarlet drops of blood dripped out of the wound. The abrupt motion of pulling his hand away had thrown the stack of books even more off-balance. It rocked and swayed, and eventually collapsed, sending Jack toppling to the ground. It wasn't too high of a fall, being about five feet, but it was definitely enough to knock the wind out of him.

The books crashed the ground, followed by the chair, with a god-awful noise. The side table or something must have knocked against the cupboard itself, causing the sword to come plummeting to the floor. Jack barely rolled out of the way in time to avoid the steel before it lodged itself in his head. In lieu of Jack's head, the blade had embedded itself into the wood floor of Teague's office.

Jack heard his mother's footsteps coming up the stairs to the office, her voice worriedly calling his name. His eyes widened in fear as he sat up and surveyed the mess that the room was. Books scattered everywhere, the chair in pieces, a chunk gouged out of the side table (Probably from hitting against the cupboard), and a sword stuck fast in the floor. He would be in colossal trouble if his mother saw.

He hastily got to his feet and set to work trying to the pull the sword up out of the wood. It was a lot harder than it had first appeared it would be. The blade was wedged deep into the floor. Jack grunted and pulled the sword hilt as hard as he could. But the sword refused to budge.

Anne Sparrow stepped into the room. "Jack, what on Earth was that noi-" she started to ask, but then saw the state of the room. "Jack!" she very nearly screeched, "By the name of all that's blessed and blasted, what did ye do?"

Jack let go of the sword and tried explain, "Well, there was this shiny thing on top of Da's cupboard and it looked like treasure and I wanted it, so I tried to get it. It sorta worked." He shrugged, and, in doing so, accidentally let his mother see the gash on his hand, which had gotten blood all over the sword hilt and was still dripping scarlet.

Anne raised an eyebrow, gesturing toward it, "And what happened to yer hand?"

"Ye see, after I piled up books and things so I could reach it, I just tried to grab the shiny thing. I didn't know it was a sword and I grabbed it. But I accidentally grabbed the blade."

Anne sighed and walked over to Jack. She expertly tore off a piece of his shirt sleeve and wrapped it tightly around the gash on his hand. Then she went over to the sword. She seized the handle and yanked the blade out of the floor. Wiping the blood off on the bottom hem of her shirt, she instructed, "Ye just clean up the rest of this mess while I go have a talk with yer father." Then she left the room and went back downstairs in search of her husband, shouting "Teague!" over and over.

Jack grimaced as he began to pick up the books, wondering when and how severely he would be punished.

The next day, Teague called Jack out to the yard, where the older pirate was waiting with two swords sheathed at his sides. "Yer mother and I got to talking last night, boy," Teague explained, while Jack stood looking up at him, "We decided that, being a pirate and frequently exposed to blades, ye should probably learn swordplay. She said that I should teach ye."

"Sounds fun," Jack said enthusiastically, "When do we start?"

"Right now," Teague answered, drawing both swords and tossing one to Jack, who thankfully caught it by the hilt this time. "Now, I suppose we'll start off with some simple parrying," Teague said, "You just try to block my strike." He lifted his own sword, and then instructed, "Make sure ye get a good grip on yer sword. The last thing ye want is for it to go flying out of yer hands in the middle of a fight."

Teague brought his sword down in a way that was generally quite easy to block. Jack parried the strike nicely, but it seemed his grip was too loose, as the sword went flying from his hands and landed on the ground six feet away.

While Jack went to go retrieve it, Teague shook his head slowly, muttering, "This could take a while."


End file.
